


Broken Systems

by waterbird13



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Andy's POV, Andy's thoughts, Gen, Mentorship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:54:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27906310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waterbird13/pseuds/waterbird13
Summary: Andromache reflects on what it means, to take new members into her family, and on their successes and failures.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 44





	Broken Systems

**Author's Note:**

> Hi all.
> 
> I honestly don't know what this is, but it's written, so you might as well have it.
> 
> Andy's POV, she's reflecting on her "system" for adopting new people into the Guard, and how that's gone (not consistently well). It's literally just her thinking. I don't know.
> 
> Anyways, I hope you like it at least.

Andromache has worked out a system for bringing in new immortals.

For a system, it never seems to work.

Three thousand years ago, or thereabouts, she finally caught up to Quynh after four hundred years of seeing the woman in her dreams. Four hundred years of convincing herself that this time, it’s real. She’s not alone.

For the first time, Andromache doesn’t have to be alone.

Quynh is four hundred years old. She is thousands of years younger than Andromache but she is the second oldest person on the planet. She knows how to fight and survive and die.

She doesn’t know how to survive the long years though, and Andromache will always be haunted that, even after four hundred years, she was likely only able to find Quynh because she was suicidal.

So Andromache builds a family with her. Digs deep within herself to find the reasons for their life and imparts them on Quynh, to give her a reason to live.

At first, it might have been selfish. Andromache physically aches at the thought of somehow being alone again, too many thousands of years of practice wiped out the minute she met her. But the first time she sees Quynh genuinely smile, wide and free, looking to Andromache to let her in on the joke, the selfishness evaporates.

Or perhaps it just changes. All Andromache knows is that she’ll never let this go, and she’s proud of what she’s made here.

They catch up to Lykon a hundred years or so after his death. Andromache answers any questions the man has, of course, and crosses blades with him whenever he seeks to test himself, and revels in having her family expand, but she leaves most of the day to day integration of him to Quynh. After all, she remembers those early days so much better than Andromache, by this point.

So Quynh introduces him to what they do and why they do it, how to survive being immortal, how to help people, how to keep your spirits up when faced with forever. And Lykon takes to it, and their family expands.

And then he dies. 

There’s a hole in them now, and they’re still deep in their grief when they get dreams of not one, but two more.

Quynh grabs Andromache’s arm, desperation in he eyes. “I can’t,” she whispers. “I can’t do it again. They should be Lykon’s.”

By all rights they should, but that’s not how it worked out, and the two men need someone when Quynh and Andromache catch up to them close to a hundred years later.

There’s something dark and sad in Quynh’s eyes, even if Andromache might be the only person able to see it. Still, she introduces their new companions—Nicolo and Yusuf—into their life.

Quynh is several thousand years old at this point. Saying she has a better grasp on those early days is a mere technicality. Andromache tries to help where she can. 

“It should have been Lykon,” Quynh mutters frequently, especially when she’s flabbergasted with the complex feelings these men still have about their first lives, their religions, their homes. Andromache can’t find it in herself to disagree.

So the first time the system broke, the world robbed them of Lykon and robbed Nicolo and Yusuf of a mentor who might have had a real understanding of them.

They figure it out though, a hodge-podge combination of having each other, pure trial and error, and whatever Andromache and Quynh can provide them. And, Andromache supposes, it’s not like they actually know the difference.

Nicolo and Yusuf are the best of them, take to this life better than any of them, whatever they might be doing. Half the time Andromache thinks they figured it all out on their own anyways, because she did not teach them most of what they clearly have come to know.

Quynh is drowned, and whatever tenuous connection Andromache still had to those early days, whatever she had put together and internalized when Quynh was new to her, snaps, likely forever.

A Napoleonic soldier is hanged to death in Russia, a sight not so unusual except for the fact that he comes back, only to die again, asphyxiating slowly. And again. And again.

Something settles within Andromache—Andrea, by then—as she sends Yusuf and Nicolo off to find him. At last, the system put right. And who better to take this man under their wings than the best of them, the men who still find joy and purpose in this life when Andromache has long since run through it?

They return to her empty-handed, because Sebastien returned to his family, despite their best efforts. And Andromache worries.

They give it their all. That much Andromache can say for them. They give it their absolute all, even when Sebastien makes it difficult.

They visit his family and attend the death beds and funerals, they pull him out of gutters and the bottle, they explain their purpose again and again, until they’re practically blue in the face. They stand by his side, wait for him to open up to them, build that bond.

Sometimes, it looks like it’s worked. Sebastien enjoys sports and will debate literature with them, laugh around the dinner table and keep that light in his eyes for hours. He’ll joke and make bets and he’ll  _ stay. _

But sometimes, Andromache looks at the three of them with a strange sort of detachment, unable to muster up much investment but knowing something isn’t right about the way Sebastien is with them.

After, Yusuf and Nicolo—Joe and Nicky—debate where they went wrong, hurt and grief and responsibility all mixed together. They wonder where they failed Sebastien, what moment might have convinced him he was all alone, even surrounded by friends. By family. If it’s their fault, if they loved each other too much, if they convinced him he was less to them.

She knows they're wrong. She knows they didn’t do anything wrong, and if them loving each other sent Sebastien down his path, then that says more about him than them. But saying it doesn’t lessen their burden. After all, he was their responsibility.

When they dream of a new one—Nile, so so young, still a baby by every standard Andromache can measure her by—Andromache herself sets off to find her. Perhaps that’s the first clue. Perhaps she should have known then, that something was wrong. That her subconscious didn’t trust Booker.

Sometimes, idly, she wonders what would have happened if she made him step up and go after Nile like she should have. If he would have found a purpose, that way. 

But she’ll never know, because she goes to Afghanistan, she doesn’t trust Sebastien and she goes for Nile, and he betrays them.

And then she’s mortal.

She can’t remember the first days anymore. Remembers finding Quynh and their first decades only in flashes. She doesn’t remember ever caring, ever feeling that thin edge of being mortal and immortal. 

And she’ll die soon, anyways. Maybe not tomorrow. But sooner than needed. Nile needs a mentor who will be there for her.

“Guess you get another one,” she tells them.

Joe and Nicky look at her. “Maybe she’s yours, Boss.”

But she shakes her head. She can’t.

“You’ll be fine,” she says instead of properly replying, not giving them a way to refuse.

So they give each other a look, the one language she’s never fully mastered, and then nod at her, before going to find Nile.

Andromache, for her part, sits back. She made a system, thousands and thousands of years ago. And it’s very very broken. But maybe this time, it will work.


End file.
